Little Rock, Ark. On a postcard perfect spring day, Tim Hutchinson is in a windowless conference room at a teaching hospital in Little Rock. The senior senator from Arkansas is spending part of his Easter recess at a field hearing on the shortage of nurses. The hearing wouldn’t ordinarily make news, but the place is swarming with cameras and reporters. Hutchinson suddenly has two challengers. A few days before, he got word of the first challenge to his Senate seat — from within the Republican party. An obscure legislator from northwest Arkansas named Jim Bob Duggar announced that he would run against his friend even though he (a) agreed with him on the issues and (b) probably wouldn’t vote any differently were he in the Senate. Jim Bob, 35-year-old father of 12 with another on the way, is not known as an overly eager pol. Yet he wants a piece of one of the nation’s premier races in 2002 — one of those few races that could decide which way the 50-50 Senate falls. Jim Bob says the Lord made him do it. Now, a more formidable opponent has stepped forward — Mark Pryor, the state’s Democratic attorney general and son of David Pryor, the man Hutchinson replaced in the Senate. In the native tongue of this small, populist state, a state that was once so yellow-dog Democrat it barked, the name Pryor translates into votes and cash. So I slide into one of the last empty seats in the sterile conference room as the newly vulnerable incumbent warms up the crowd — and then proceeds to win it over with an impressive combination of wit and erudition. The place is packed with tired-looking young people in white lab coats and scrubs — and the press. When the hearing is over, the locusts descend. With cameras aimed, microphones extended, Hutchinson smiles. “Before we get started,” he teases, “does anybody have any questions about the nursing bill?” The reporters laugh and start asking questions about the 2002 campaign. “It’s a little early, isn’t it?” Hutchinson asks, knowing full well it’s not. A couple of weeks later, George W. Bush will headline his first major fund-raising event as president. In Little Rock. For Senator Tim Hutchinson. The event raises a state record, $1.06 million, more than half of what Hutchinson spent to win his seat five years ago. No, it’s not early. “It’s such a unique year with a 50-50 split in the Senate,” says Bill Paschall, a political consultant who managed Pryor’s successful campaign for attorney general. “It changes the dynamic across the country. Races have to start early. This will be one of the top five in the country, and we’ll see millions pour in.” Hutchinson says he’ll have to raise between $3 million and $4 million, and he expects Pryor to raise at least as much. Add in soft money and spending by independent groups — campaign-finance reform permitting — and this might be Arkansas’s first $20-million campaign, and without a Clinton in sight. This in a state where shaking hands and slapping backs and eating chicken-fried steak is still a major part of campaigning. “Hutchinson-Pryor spending will blow everything away,” says one of the state’s veteran political operatives. “Many Arkansans will play both sides. In addition, the Clinton presidency has opened many new national fund-raising opportunities for Arkansas candidates like Mark Pryor. I don’t know what is the most expensive race to date, but this one will put it and others to shame.” It’s got marquee appeal. In one corner, you’ve got Pryor, a political comer with a heavyweight name and a lightweight r sum , a young man who beat cancer and bounced back to win statewide office. In the other, you’ve got the first Republican elected from Arkansas to the Senate since Reconstruction, an experienced legislator, a courageous voice for human rights in China, and a social conservative whose divorce and remarriage has been the most talked about unspoken issue of the campaign. But before the main event, there’s the preliminary bout. Jim Bob Duggar sounds like the kind of Arkansas character some Hollywood scriptwriter would make up. He’s a state legislator from northwest Arkansas, the fastest-growing part of the state and one of the fastest-growing regions in the country thanks largely to companies like Tyson and Wal-Mart. Northwest Arkansas is also the most conservative part of an increasingly conservative southern state. A place where the word divorce is still whispered, so as not to offend. Jim Bob may be the only living politician to the right of Tim Hutchinson. And according to the National Journal’s congressional vote ratings, there’s nobody farther to the right than the senator from Arkansas. What’s more, the senator from Arkansas voted to convict the president from Arkansas. And his younger brother, Asa, prosecuted the president as one of the House managers. So if ideology doesn’t separate Tim H. from Jim Bob, what does? Well, ideology. Funny thing about Republicans in Arkansas, and especially Republicans in northwest Arkansas, they come in three varieties: conservative, more conservative, and Shi’ite Republicans (so dubbed by the governor, Mike Huckabee, a conservative Republican himself). Which brings us to the tabloid portion of our show: Tim Hutchinson is divorced. Big deal? You wouldn’t think so. But he remarried a former staffer, and he labors under an unfair political stereotype — that he’s a social conservative who ran strictly on Family Values and hence is a hypocrite. In truth, the ’96 campaign was run on national issues like Medicaid and taxes and Social Security reform. Tim Hutchinson, nicknamed No-Tax Tim by Bill Clinton, never made family values much of an issue in his race. Still, there’s no denying that Hutchinson’s personal life has become an annoyance to his fledgling reelection campaign, like a low-grade fever. Indeed, when reporters rush him after his hearing at the medical center, one of the first questions is personal. And why else would Jim Bob Duggar, family man, challenge Hutchinson? Other than the God stuff, he won’t say. Is God not happy with Tim Hutchinson? Well, one thing’s for sure: Some of the Shi’ite Republicans aren’t. And Jim Bob’s entry into the race brings up the D-I-V-O-R-C-E in a way a Democratic opponent never could. The party of Bill Clinton isn’t considered an authority on family values. Meanwhile, over in the party of Hutchinson, the ghost of Lee Atwater hovers. Marty Ryall, the executive director of the state GOP, welcomed Pryor the Younger into the race by declaring that he’d “ridden his daddy’s coattails about as far as he can, and if his last name wasn’t Pryor, he’d be a busboy at Taco Bell.” To his credit, Pryor didn’t drop the chalupa. He called Ryall’s comments “zesty.” Fast-food talk aside, Mark Pryor is running for his father’s old seat, and David Pryor is about as beloved as any politician the state has known. In the cult of personality that is Arkansas politics, David Pryor was the ideal combination: a self-effacing southerner with charm. Voters who twice elected him governor and sent him to the Senate for three terms knew him simply as David. An Arkansas journalist once dubbed him the state’s unofficial pet rock. Just listen to what Hutchinson has to say about him: “The thing about David Pryor is, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with his politics, everybody recognizes him as a gentleman. David Pryor is one of the most likable people around.” Mark Pryor inherited his father’s just-folks appeal. He’s the kind of regular guy you could find playing basketball at the local Y, and the kind of Arkansas politician that everybody seems to know. But he’s still mainly known as David’s boy, and one wonders if the political-instincts gene skipped a generation. Mark Pryor served two undistinguished terms in the Arkansas House and has been on the job as the state’s top lawyer for just two years. He has managed to secure some headlines for his work protecting consumers against telemarketers and also keeping the tobacco lawyers at bay as the state smoked out a settlement. But his most visible act as attorney general seems to be his decision to run for the U.S. Senate. Accommodating as he usually is, Pryor wouldn’t talk to me for this story. His chief of staff explained that his boss has a job to do, and the race is young, and he doesn’t want to get into campaign issues just yet, and . . . well, okay. But it seems like a strange way to campaign. Then again, it might be the perfect strategy when your name is Pryor and you’re running for statewide office in Arkansas. Surely there will be other issues, but right now there seem to be only two: Mark Pryor’s name and Tim Hutchinson’s vulnerability. Oh, and money. Back at the hearing on the nursing shortage, I’m reminded why Tim Hutchinson was elected in the first place. He’s very good at this type of thing. The nurses, who looked like they were ordered to show up, are nodding along at things he says. I jot down a list of Hutchinson qualities the Democrats will underestimate: his experience, his grasp of and interest in the issues, his ability to articulate a position, his energy, and, finally, his lack of horns and tail. You set somebody up as a fire-breathing zealot, demonize him long enough, and expectations are for the very worst. Anything less is better — for Tim Hutchinson. So I’m thinking about all this as I drive back to the office, when I notice not one but two faded bumper-stickers on cars that rumble by. Pryor, they say, and that’s all. It’s hard to tell whether the stickers are from David’s last race in ’90 or Mark’s last race in ’98, and then I wonder if it really matters. In Arkansas, a name may still be more powerful than an idea. Tim Hutchinson has his hands full. Kane Webb is assistant editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
